


The Place of A Brand

by Trixree



Series: On Branding [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Short One Shot, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, i don't know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:40:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22931926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixree/pseuds/Trixree
Summary: There are other ways that Sanji carries the Vinsmokes with him.
Series: On Branding [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090193
Comments: 11
Kudos: 260





	The Place of A Brand

Vinsmoke Judge harbored no sentimentality about his children. In order to get where he wanted to go, such a silly frivolous thing as _sentiment_ had to be left behind.

His children are his experiments. The relationship there is simple and clearly defined, beautifully uncomplicated by sentimentality. His children are his experiments so he treats them as such.

At birth, they are numbered accordingly. 

* * *

The little eggplant is hiding something. The kid is horribly transparent and he’s started sulking around the damn restaurant, stinking up the place with his shifty eye and hunched shoulders. Zeff is annoyed. Not _worried._ Annoyed. 

(Definitely not worried.)

He gives the eggplant his time and his space. Zeff knows that if it is something serious, either the boy will figure it out on his own or eventually bring it to him for help. He’s not _stupid,_ he’s just young. 

And by all accounts, the boy should be thrilled. The _Baratie_ set sail only a month ago and business has been steadily climbing. They’re developing a _reputation_ and fast, too. It’s good work. Rewarding. Yet the little eggplant is sulking around and spending most of his time looking very guilty for being alive. 

(Zeff is most assuredly _not_ worried.) 

Eventually, his theory proves right. He’s logging receipts from their latest produce order with his office door open while Sanji washes the last of the dishes in the kitchen sink. Sanji is in eyesight from his desk, all gangling prepubescent limbs and awkward, graceless fumbling, though he’s careful around the kitchen. 

“Um,” Sanji starts. He’s gone still at the sink but hasn’t turned around. 

Zeff grunts. “Speak with confidence like a man,” he commands. Sanji hunches a little bit in on himself. (Zeff doesn’t feel bad. Definitely not. It’s just that the eggplant usually puffs up under the admonishment, rising like a fire to the challenge. He rarely shrinks at his words. Not unless something is wrong.) 

“I need to tell you something.” 

“Spit it out,” Zeff says not-unkindly. 

Sanji dries his hands at the sink and slinks over to the office, hands deep in his pockets and his young face impossibly grim (far, far too grim for someone so young). 

“You ever heard of the Germa Kingdom?” The words come tripping out of the boy’s throat like they’re dragged across gravel. All of Zeff’s instincts scream _danger,_ even without knowing the history behind that name. (Unfortunately, Zeff knows the history behind that name. He’s not _young._ ) 

“What about it?” 

Sanji laughs and it’s a pathetic little sound. “Haven’t heard that much, then. Not if you don’t already know.” He gestures helplessly at his eyebrow. 

“Eggplant,” Zeff says, because sometimes this is all the prompting that Sanji _needs._

“Vinsmoke,” Sanji whispers, like the very word sickens him.

The boy snaps his head up suddenly, intent on meeting Zeff’s stare head-on. His visible blue eye is welled up with tears.

“I’m…” 

It clicks before his little eggplant has even finished the thought. 

Zeff stands just as Sanji collapses into tears. With a punched-out wail, he crumples like a paper doll, folding down on himself, his knees making a dull _thud_ against the wood floor. He hunches over his knees on the floor, covering his face with his eyes, and he cries like Zeff has not seen him cry since the day they were rescued from out of Hell itself. 

Zeff does not touch him, because that is not something that he does. He makes his presence known, standing unwavering just by the boy as he wails with all the air in his lungs. 

“Eggplant,” Zeff says. It sounds woefully inadequate in the sob-filled space between them. Then, Zeff sits on the floor, just in front of the boy. In reach. Just in case. 

Eventually, Sanji cries himself out. 

“I need to ask you something,” he says. Zeff hums and waits for him to continue. Sanji twists, looking over his shoulder. The motion puts his back facing Zeff. Sanji reaches behind himself and pulls his shirt up and away from his spine. 

In the center of his lower back is the number **_3_** , a tattoo in thick black ink, impossibly dark on his pale skin. 

Zeff’s breath catches in his throat. He feels sick. 

“I want it _off,”_ Sanji hisses. “But… I can’t _reach.”_

“Eggplant…” 

“Old man… _please,_ ” Sanji’s voice breaks around the word, and as much as Zeff cares for him, he cannot give him this. 

(Maybe, perhaps, it is because he cares for him _too much_ that he cannot willingly take that awful number off of his flesh. He cannot spill the boy's blood.) 

Sanji slams the door behind him when he flees. 

* * *

As a teenager, Sanji picks up some pretty stupid fucking habits. 

At twelve, he starts smoking. Zeff nearly brains him to death when he catches him the first time. Admittedly, this only makes Sanji want to do it _more._ Smoking helps the anxiety which helps the fidgeting which helps the biting his nails thing, which Zeff _also_ hates, so Sanji is _pretty fucking sure_ that Zeff is the one winning here.

Besides. Sanji thinks it makes him look _cool._

At fourteen, he rockets up like a weed in height, suddenly tall and lanky. Puberty and the smoking together deepen his voice (although his laugh is still stupidly, embarrassingly high pitched and he hates it) and before he knows it, he starts getting mistaken as way older than he really is. This leads to the next stupid fucking habit: _fucking._

He’s come to terms with the fact that he’s a failure—the number branded in black on his back never lets him forget it, neither do the Vinsmokes that follow him into his nightmares, neither does that awful fucking look on Zeff’s face when he told him _no_ in his silence that starts in plenty of nightmares all on its own—so the first time an older man hits on Sanji in a shitty little port-town bar, Sanji thinks _fuck-it,_ and sucks the guy off in the alley out back. 

As the guy pulls his hair and fucks his face, some sick part of him thinks, _finally._ T his is _retribution._ This is what’s always been coming to him, except… except _now he’s in control of it._ So he leans into the burn of the grip on his scalp and swallows. 

When the stranger pets his head in a drunken post-coital bliss and coos, “pretty boy”, Sanji pretends that the strange way the praise lights up his insides can be a punishment on its own. 

With the power to decide when and how life decides to shit on him, Sanji develops a habit for sucking cock wherever the _Baratie_ happens to dock for supplies and maintenance. It’s an escape. A cleansing ritual.

At sixteen, he starts taking it further than sucking cock. He lets all sorts of people fuck him all sorts of ways, as long as it isn't gentle. 

He knows it’s fucking _sick._ (But, just in case he didn’t already know, the look on Zeff’s face when the old man _finds out_ is a pretty clear fucking indication.) 

He’s still got his dreams and he’s still got his shame and he’s still got his fucking habits even at nineteen when an absolute moron with a straw hat throws a cannonball through their roof and through Sanji’s _life._

It turns out, the straw-hat idiot believes in _dreams._

* * *

Luffy tells him to _be his cook_ and Sanji says _fuck no_ and Luffy says _but you’re the best_ and Sanji still says _fuck no_ and then… Luffy catches him feeding that man, Gin. After Sanji feeds him, Sanji kisses him, bruising and hard, because it feels like the right thing to do. Sanji likes to suck off strangers and get fucked by strangers and kiss starving strangers that affirm all his deepest convictions. 

_We're all equal when it comes to hunger,_ so he kisses Gin, bruising and fierce, and tastes his own cooking in the other man's mouth. 

When Luffy asks again, Sanji says yes. 

_How do you run from someone that’s seen your soul?_

* * *

_A swordsman wears his shame on his back,_ the deranged brute with the green hair and the bandanna says right before he lets the "Hawk-Eye" psycho bisect him.

Sanji doesn't give two flying fucks about the Bushido code or whatever, but he thinks that the adage is pretty on the nose, as far as these things go. 

* * *

Thanking Zeff and the other shitty cooks is the hardest thing Sanji has ever had to do. He bows before them, crying, and even though it’s not what he says, what he means is: _I’m sorry you lost so much for me_ and _I’m sorry that I couldn’t be the man you wanted me to be_ and _I’m sorry I asked so much of you and hated you when you couldn’t do it._

Maybe when he finds the All Blue, it’ll help mend the parts of him that just won’t heal.

(Maybe, when he looks into Zeff’s eyes, he thinks he sees forgiveness before he sails away after a dream.)

* * *

Sanji doesn’t need to hear Nami’s story. Not only is it not his to hear, he thinks he knows it instinctively—knows it in his _bones_ and in the persistent, nightmare itch on his back. (He sees the Aarlong Pirate's symbol tattooed on her shoulder and things click into place.) 

After all is said and done at Aarlong Park, Sanji sees the blood and the bandages on her hands and he thinks he knows _that_ instinctively, too. 

He comes to her in the aftermath. 

Nami can probably sense that something is different about this interaction. He's certainly not going to come onto her or flirt with her (or at least, that isn't his intention.) Maybe it’s in his demeanor. Maybe it’s something else. But, as he steps quietly into the private room of Cocoyashi’s medical practice, there is something soft and understanding in her eyes. 

“Hey,” Sanji says.

She looks tired. She looks beautiful.

“What, no ‘mellorine’ this time?” Her tone is playful and honey-warm. 

Sanji smiles at her, thin and strained. “How’s your arm?” he says. 

Nami grimaces. “Luffy told you?” The candlelight makes her hair glow. After a moment, she scoots over, making it clear that Sanji is welcome to sit on the bed. He steps closer, but doesn’t sit. 

“No, he didn't,” Sanji says. Then, in explanation, he turns his back to her and lifts his shirt. 

Nami gasps. “Oh,” she says on an exhale.

Sanji lets his shirt fall back down. He meets her eyes.

Nami looks him dead-on and pats the bed forcefully. Acquiescing, Sanji sits. 

Once he's sitting, she talks, “So… three?”

He nods. Another realization comes to her in the space between one breath and the next. “Your name… Oh, _god_ ,” her voice wavers, breaking like a heavy wave against an abrupt shore. 

“I asked someone very dear to me once to remove it,” Sanji offers into the raw silence of the moment. “I tried a few times but… I never could reach. And… I didn’t want to accidentally set myself on fire.” He smiles at her, though he’s not sure if it reaches his eyes. “Just goes to show you’re a much stronger person than I.” 

Nami snatches up his hand and holds it, interlacing their fingers and squeezing once, hard. 

“I don’t know about that,” she says. 

* * *

Nami gets a different symbol in its place-- something that means _home_ and _family_ and _safe_ to her.

As they sail away from the little island in the East Blue, the smell of tangerine trees fragrant and sweet in the crisp sea-air, Sanji looks at the gaggle of odd-balls that make up this foolish little crew. Idly, Sanji touches his back. 

He wonders what will take the place of his brand, someday. 

(This, too, is a type of dream.)

**Author's Note:**

> I had no real intention or plan when writing this and I'm not quite even sure what to make of it. Consider it just further exploration of Sanji and his unique brand of trauma. Also Nami is here because I was rewatching some of Aarlong Park recently and... damn.
> 
> Also, a small note, the title has two meanings. "The Place of A Brand" means both the physical placement of the thing and the possibility of what might come to eventually take its spot. 
> 
> Find me on [tumblr!](https://trixree.tumblr.com/)


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